Benito never kicked my cat

Tucker Carlson:

Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?

These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is "no." Vladimir Putin didn't do any of that. So, why does permanent Washington hate him so much?

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-gives-passionate-defense-vladimir-putin-person

*

Benito never kicked my cat,

Ate my porridge, crushed my hat.

Stalin remembered to return

My samovar, my coffee urn.

Hitler and the Nazi SS

Never made my carpet a mess.

I confess that Pol Pot

Never took my parking spot.

Pinochet and Vlad the Impaler

Never squatted in my house trailer.

The Tonton Macoute and Papa Doc

Never re-set my electric clock.

And surely Chairman Mao

Never tried to milk my cow.

Franco warned the Falange:

“Hands off Tucker’s blancmange.”

Thus I am so very glad 

To deny that they were bad.

 

Special Cover-up

George Orwell’s most famous essay is “Politics and the English Language,” written in 1946.* He wrote out of concern that “the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language” and in hope that “one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. 

The workings of euphemism are wonderful: “pacification” has the root meaning “making peaceful”; “rectification” has the root meaning “making right.” Who can oppose such claims? And surely “elimination” of the “unreliable” has to be beneficial.

Euphemism is from a Greek word meaning "good speech.” The substitution of nice terms to cover up nasty deeds (as exemplified above) is one way to accomplish that mind trickery. Another way is the use of very general and/or abstract words to deflect audience’s attention from the dirty specifics.** 

Putin’s war against Ukraine can serve as an object lesson in euphemism. For one thing, the word “war” has been outlawed in Russia; Putin has called his invasion a “special operation.” What can be vaguer than something called “an operation”? What exactly goes on in “an operation”? The use of the term when applied to a surgical practice (probably the most used application of the term), although describing an action that is designed to have a beneficial outcome, is still a cover-up of the nasty work of cutting into a patient’s body. Beyond medicine, the vagueness of “operation” can denote any kind of action: the “operation” of a motor vehicle, for example. 

And the modifier “special”: the “operation” is not indiscriminate or ordinary, but purposely focused, like a “special” gift for a “special” person.

Meanwhile, shells are landing on civilian targets, millions are fleeing their homes, or hiding out in improvised shelters—and the death toll mounts.

*

Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB man, may be an expert in spycraft, but he is no historian. His arguments about the relationship of Russia and Ukraine (and Russians and Ukrainians) is fraught with error. In a speech in February, Putin asserted that 

Ukraine and Russia are, in historical terms, essentially inseparable.

“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said. . . . “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”***

Ok, let’s for the moment forget that what Putin said is not historically correct. Let’s instead consider that that is what Putin sincerely believes. Which is the real interesting thing. If Putin can unleash a war against a populace he believes to be his own people—that is native Russians—what carnage and destruction would he unleash against the natives of Ukraine if he believed that they were really Ukrainians?

***

* https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

** Consider here these two examples of Nazi euphemism:

“As part of the final solution…Jews fit for work” would be separated by sex and forced to do road construction, “in the course of which the majority will doubtless succumb to natural wastage.”

Dear Party Comrade Rademacher! On my return trip from Berlin I met an old party comrade, who works in the east on the settlement of the Jewish question. In the near future many of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated through special measures.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/24/wannsee-the-road-to-the-final-solution-peter-longerich/

*** https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/2/23/22945781/russia-ukraine-putin-speech-transcript-february-22

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

End Note:

"The war is framed in Russia in terms of forcing peace upon Ukraine."

Masha Gessen

The New Yorker

Witches' Brew

BRABANTIO

O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow'd my daughter?

Damn'd as thou art, thou hast enchanted her;

For I'll refer me to all things of sense,

If she in chains of magic were not bound,

Whether a maid so tender, fair and happy,

So opposite to marriage that she shunned

The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,

Would ever have, to incur a general mock,

Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom

Of such a thing as thou, to fear, not to delight.

Judge me the world, if 'tis not gross in sense

That thou hast practised on her with foul charms,

Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals

That weaken motion: I'll have't disputed on;

'Tis probable and palpable to thinking.

I therefore apprehend and do attach thee

For an abuser of the world, a practiser

Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.

Othello (Act I Scene 2)

*

Thus the accusation by Desdemona’s father against Othello. How could the Moor win his bride unless he “hast enchanted her”? He has used “chains of magic” to bind her. He “hast practised on her with foul charms” and used “drugs or minerals.” And, overall, Othello is “an abuser of the world, a practiser/ Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.”

Brabantio later complains to the Duke of Venice about his daughter (Act I, Scene 3):

She is abused, stol'n from me, and corrupted

By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks;

For nature so preposterously to err,

Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense,

Sans witchcraft could not.

Othello counters that the only “witchcraft” he has used was telling Desdemona the story of his life and the adventures that he underwent. 

My story being done,

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:

She swore, in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange,

'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:

She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd

That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,

And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,

I should but teach him how to tell my story.

And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:

She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

This only is the witchcraft I have used.

The Duke wisely notes that Brabantio’s vouching 

is no proof,

Without more wider and more overt test

Than these thin habits and poor likelihoods

Of modern seeming do prefer against him.

 

*

How often do people, when faced with an outcome they deplore, refuse to accept that a better story has won the day, insisting instead that their opponent has used underhanded methods to fool others? 

*

Let’s move from 16th century Venice to 21st century America.

A Republican House candidate claimed Saturday that college education turns young people into “radical, leftist, hating-America atheists.”

“We know how important the youth are to our future because you can raise them the right way. You can work your butts off every day to put food on the table, send them off to college, and then what ends up happening?” said Christian Collins, a Republican candidate for Texas’ 8th Congressional district, at a rally just north of Houston at the Grace Woodlands church.

“They go off to college not knowing what they believe sometimes, and their teachers, their professors, try to deconstruct everything that you’ve taught them. And they go off with the college that you paid for and come out radical, leftist, hating-America atheists, and they don’t have any usable skills to get employed. And then they’re even more cynical.”*

Oh, those poor, innocent Desdemonas and Desdemonos, lured from their natural homegrown biases—if not by charms and minerals—then by the witchcraft of the coven of PhDs who inhabit the iniquitous dens of university halls!

That students in colleges around the country hear stories (and arguments and proofs) that touch their hearts and their minds, and so, freely, do take up liberal causes cannot be accepted by those who, as the Duke of Venice says, “vouch” without further proof that it can only be some sort of black magic that has been practiced on the vulnerable young.

*

Of course, there is no reason to trust this post. I spent over a third of the 20th century as a modern-day warlock.

***

* https://news.yahoo.com/gop-house-candidate-says-college-015817343.html

No Soap

The year 2022 has started slowly for courtroom watchers after 2021 ended with a splash. The biggie in December was the verdict in the sex abuse trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty on 5 of 6 counts, including sex trafficking of a minor. 

I, like many (most? all?) of you, eagerly followed the daily dispatches coming out of the courtroom. The final summings-up by reporters who daily attended the trial indicated that they believed that the jurors had correctly found Maxwell guilty. For example, Naomi Fry in The New Yorker stated, “The government’s case . . . was damning.”* And this was the view of Choire Sicha, who followed the trial for New York magazine:

A full not-guilty slate would have been shattering. What if four women had presented coherent, believable, similar, interlocking stories about abuse that was, at very best, facilitated by Ghislaine Maxwell — and a jury hadn’t agreed she was at fault? Awful.**

My reading of the case agreed.

*

But I have no interest in discussing the case itself here. What I latched onto in Fry’s article was the view of Maxwell’s character Fry determined from observing her courtroom demeanor. Fry cited Maxwell’s “brand of chilly hauteur.”

Maxwell remained sphinxlike throughout the trial, expressing no frailty and certainly no regret. 

And for Fry, worst of all,

[w]hen the jury announced its verdict, Maxwell, who was wearing a black mask and dark clothing, sat very still. According to the Times she took a sip of water and touched her face briefly, before being ushered out of the courtroom. At no point did she betray any emotion.

Sicha called her, “A reactionless Ghislaine Maxwell.”

*

While the Maxwell trial was proceeding in New York City, on the left coast another fascinating courtroom case was taking place: the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood-testing company Theranos, who was accused of fraud. A few days after the New York jury found Maxwell guilty on 5 of 6 counts, Holmes was found guilty on 4 of 11 counts of fraud, not guilty on another 4, while the panel could not agree on a verdict on the other 3 counts.***

While the verdict was being read, the Times tells us, Holmes

sat motionless. Then she gathered her belongings and whispered to her lawyer. She went down the row of family and friends in the court gallery behind her, hugging each one before leaving through a side door.

*

In both cases, the defendant, when found guilty, did not exhibit any emotion—no soap opera histrionics, rending of garments, tears or shrieks. For Fry, Maxwell’s demeanor was a display of what the title of her article called Maxwell’s “relentless ego.” 

This was a woman [Fry wrote] who has long acted, and has continued to act, as if she had absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

Fry even found fault in Maxwell’s contention that she need not testify, because 

"the government has not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and so there is no need for me to testify."

While we may never know whether that refusal hurt her defense, certainly Maxwell was within her rights to challenge the government to make its case. Perhaps it was legal judgment (or gamble), not ego, that persuaded Maxwell to decline.

*

One who does show his feelings (of grief) is Hamlet. Clad in an “inky cloak” and “suits of solemn black” and emitting sighs and tears, he, nevertheless, asserts that what he is really feeling no one can know: “I have that within which passeth show.” 

Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'

'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,

That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play:

But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(Act I, Scene 2)

The lesson that Naomi Fry and others should take away from Hamlet is the old saw “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” The lack of emotional display by Ghislaine Maxwell (and Elizabeth Holmes) was not necessarily due to ego or hauteur (it might even have been stoicism). 

Find the women guilty of their crimes, if you wish, but don’t claim to read people's minds or to determine their inner emotions through their outward demeanor. They may have "that within which passeth show."

***

 *  https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-relentless-ego-of-ghislaine-maxwell

**  https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-it-doesnt-matter-why-she-did-it.html   

***  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/elizabeth-holmes-guilty.html

(What impressed me about the verdicts in both cases was that the jurors obviously took great pains to consider the implications of each accusation, and did not just toss a blanket guilty or not guilty judgment over the cases. It made me feel good about my fellow citizens.) 

My New Job

I’m confident that I will be starting a new job soon.

Justice Stephen Breyer has announced that he is retiring from the highest judicial panel in the country. I have tossed my hat into the ring as a candidate for the position. 

I will explain below why I am confident that I will get the nod, but first let me go back in time. After I retired from college teaching at the end of 2000, I was content to sit back and perform no other job. But after some time passed, I began to get antsy. I had to do something. However, it seemed that the only job available was as a greeter at Walmart. My ego would not let me take that job; it would have been a great comedown after having achieved the highest academic rank of full professor. I needed something at the top of the heap.

On February 28, 2013, I saw my opportunity: Pope Benedict resigned as leader of the Catholic church. Surely, the Roman folks would recognize my great administrative skills—as exemplified by my terms as English Department chairman. 

Alas, it was not to be. The church’s cardinals elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentine member of the Society of Jesus. While Bergoglio, I was sure, had fine credentials, I viewed his election as rank discrimination—specifically, ageism. Bergoglio was chosen because he was exactly four days younger than me! At first, I vowed to fight the appointment on the grounds of discrimination, but, after due consideration, I could not determine where to file my lawsuit; certainly, my case would have no standing in any United States jurisdiction, and fighting it in Vatican City seemed like a lost cause from the start. 

No other job opening appealed to me until Justice Breyer’s announcement. I should be a member of the Supreme Court. (I could explain why, but I am too modest to boast of my fairness and judgment.) I admit that at 85 years of age I am two years older than the retiring justice. However, by nominating me, President Biden would be striking a blow against the vicious bigotry of ageism. And for that reason alone, the world—and the Court—would be better places.

And I am ready to pay for my own robe!

 

Into the Wilderness

I have just discovered why I have had lack of success in my life; I have never had anyone on whom I could blame my lack of success. I have not had a scapegoat.

Consider Novak Djokovic. A great tennis player but also a great schmuck.* He has just been booted out of Australia, where he wished to pursue his tenth men’s singles title at the Australian Open, for not being vaccinated and for (let’s be nice and call them) “misstatements” on his visa application. And who was to blame for the errors on the application? Certainly not Djokovic. It was his “agent” and his “support team.”

Novak Djokovic has blamed his agent for an “administrative mistake” when declaring he had not travelled in the two weeks before his flight to Australia and acknowledged an “error of judgment” by not isolating after he tested positive for Covid.

The world No 1 released a statement on Wednesday in a bid to address what he called “continuing misinformation” about his activities in December before he came to Australia in a bid to retain his Australian Open crown. . . .

Djokovic said the incorrect pre-travel declaration of 1 January was “submitted by my support team on my behalf”.

“My agent sincerely apologises for the administrative mistake in ticking the incorrect box about my previous travel before coming to Australia. This was a human error and certainly not deliberate.”**

So, there’s the support team thrown under the bus.

*

Five years ago to the day, I wrote a blog post about plagiarism and the excuses that are forthcoming when the stealing is outed.*** I did not at that time directly cite instances when the convenient scapegoat was produced. He/she was usually a hired researcher, go-fer, or typist who allegedly practiced one-handed shuffling with the author’s file cards. And the anonymous scapegoat, bearing the sins, was released into the wilderness, while the author him/herself attempted to remain in the tabernacle.****

*

You remember the story (apocryphal, of course) about young George Washington and the cherry tree. If George were alive today, the dialogue about the tree would go like this:

Washington Senior: Who chopped down the cherry tree?

Georgie: I cannot tell a lie. It was the gardener.

***

* "There was his encounter with Dr. Igor Cetojevic, a Bosnian Serb, who, while watching Djokovic on TV during the 2010 Australian Open, became convinced that the player’s need for medical time-outs had nothing to do with asthma, as some thought, but with too much gluten in his diet. Not long after, Cetojevic met Djokovic in Croatia, during the Davis Cup, where he asked Djokovic to raise his right arm twice, once while holding, in his left hand, a slice of bread to his belly; the exercise convinced Djokovic that his muscles were weaker when proximate to wheat. There was also, in 2016, his hiring of Pepe Imaz, a Spanish coach who evangelized about the transformative power of long hugs. More recently, there was Djokovic’s friendship with the wellness entrepreneur Chervin Jafarieh, who talks of having lived in jungles and among shamans, sells supplements and elixirs, and, in May of 2020, listened approvingly during an Instagram Live conversation as Djokovic explained that polluted water can be purified by human consciousness, because water molecules 'react to our emotions, to what is being said.'”

https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/djokovics-strange-australian-odyssey

** https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jan/12/novak-djokovic-statement-blames-agent-for-australia-paperwork-mistake-covid-positive-test-result

*** https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-dog-ate-my-file-cabinet.html

**** [H]e shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat.

And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering.

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

Leviticus 16

Stars and Stripes

I have just finished reading The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, an account of the creation of the renowned Oxford English Dictionary. The “Professor” was James Murray, the editor of the work, the “Madman,” Dr. William Chester Minor, an American army surgeon who killed a man in London and, having been found not guilty by reason of insanity, spent all save the last year of his life thereafter in mental asylums, but who contributed many citations to the project.

Reflecting on the book, I discovered that I had no real talent for fashioning dictionary definitions. Thus, I am at a complete loss to engage in a lengthy debate with those personages who are advocating that schools in the United States teach “Americanism” in a battle to combat the alleged nefarious instruction accompanying new looks at American history.

There are those who seemingly would put “Freedom” foremost in their definition of Americanism. On the one hand, the term has been appropriated by the worst reactionary politicians of the Republican Party (the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, for example). On the other hand, while the American national anthem boasts of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” the anthem of our northern neighbors, who stuck with King George, asserts that they are “The True North, strong and free.” Since both North American countries claim the same thing, I dismiss “Freedom” (however interpreted) as a defining factor of Americanism.

What I have come up with as the essence of Americanism (my limited ability could take me only so far) is the concept of Government by Consent of the Governed, which means fair elections open to all citizens who are to be ruled by the elected. (Somehow, it seems that many of the advocates of “Freedom” are working to subvert this concept.) In a fair election one person’s vote counts as much as the next person’s. They are unintimidated by outside forces, and their vote is unimpeded by political contrivance. The vote count is supervised by impartial observers. The person with the most votes wins; the loser concedes, maybe to prevail the next time. For Americanism, there must be a next time.

*

I once lost an election by one vote. It turned out, however, that two ballots had arrived in the mail after the set deadline. I was urged by someone who had a personal dislike of the other candidate to appeal, to try to make the late ballots be counted. I refused. The rules were the rules. And according to the rules, I lost. End of story.